Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
A New Orleans family has found shelter and some sense of normality in the Sweet Home area after fleeing Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.
Calvin and Heidi Rice and their children are staying with Mr. Rice’s parents, Richard and Carroll Rice, and their Aunt Carrollyn on the family homestead on Upper Calapooia Drive, in the Holley area.
“We don’t usually evacuate for hurricanes,” Heidi Rice said.
“My guide for years was category 5,” said Calvin Rice. Now, as his family has grown, that standard has gone down to category 3. “Back in ’82, I probably wouldn’t have left town.”
In a presentation Heidi Rice saw at work, a safety officer outlined a scenario for category 3 and up that would end with the levees that protect the areas below sea level breaking. The Rices talked about how they shouldn’t stay through hurricanes.
“He made it quite clear to me that the flooding was quite likely,” Heidi Rice said.
They started watching this hurricane as it developed in late August. It appeared that it would miss New Orleans. By Friday of that week, it had shifted toward New Orleans.
“We got up Saturday morning (Aug. 27),” said Calvin Rice. “The track had gotten worse.”
They began to gather supplies, and Rice spent four hours boarding up the windows.
The Rices were still waffling about whether to evacuate that night.
By Aug. 28, Sunday, Katrina had shifted only a degree or two to the east and was still on track for New Orleans. They had hoped it would shift farther east. The rain and wind tend to be less severe on the west side of hurricanes, the Rices said.
“We decided to go,” they said in an e-mail to friends and family describing their experience. “Threw together a few essential documents and clothes (shorts and T-shirts) and left at 7:30 a.m.”
They took only enough clothing for about three days, expecting to return when the storm was over. It took them 10 hours to reach Calvin Rice’s aunt in Longview, Texas. They said they met one woman who left at noon on Sunday, and took her 30 hours to reach Longview.
Monday, Aug. 29, they watched the hurricane unfold on television.
“After a couple of days of viewing the horrifying escalation of the disaster, it began to sink in that we would not be going back any time soon,” the Rices said. “So we decided to go to … Oregon and make ourselves useful.”
While here, they are helping around their family’s 1868 farm house, gathering wood for the winter, roofing a shed, fixing fences and other work.
They flew into Portland,where they stayed with a friend, “all the while, reeling and appalled by the totally botched relief effort, still not able to fully comprehend the reality that our city will be uninhabitable for several months at best. We’ve accepted our displacement as semi-permanent, toured the local schools.”
Daughters Raven, a second-grader, and Lily, a first-grader, are attending Calvin Rice’s old school, Holley Elementary. Their son, Axel, 3, is attending preschool at Little Promises.
“The kids have settled into the farm and school routine, and we’re pretty well normalized,” the Rices said.
“The good news is our house was not flooded, and its 40-plus-year-old roof suffered only minor damage,” they said. They received the news from a friend who lives in the French Quarter and stayed through the storm.
The Rices live in Fauberg Marigny, the first suburb of the French Quarter. Neither the French Quarter nor their neighborhood was flooded.
About 80 percent of New Orleans is below sea level and protected by the levees, Calvin Rice said. The older parts of the city, the French Quarter, were built above sea level.
The Rices thought their home would survive the storm, but they were worried about the aftermath. As far as their home goes, one of the biggest problems will be the refrigerator, which has been without power for weeks.
Rice grew up in Sweet Home in the same house where his family is staying now. He attended Holley and graduated from Sweet Home High School in 1972. He earned a degree in architecture from the University of Oregon in 1978. He worked in Eugene with a structural engineering firm.
“I realized that structural engineering was nice but not my forte,” he said. “The restless bug in me took me on a six-month journey.”
While in Mexico, he met people from New Orleans who told him he should visit the historic city when he returned to the United States. He did, and he loved it. He loved the architecture and history of New Orleans. He set out to look for an architecture firm specializing in restoration after Mardi Gras wore off and he realized he had been traveling for five months.
He soon landed a position with Koch and Wilson Architects.
“Twenty-three years later, I own the company with two partners,” he said.
Heidi Rice is Irish. She was finishing up her education in New York when she met Calvin. Her mother lived in New Orleans, and she had gone to visit. The Rices met at a jazz festival while she was there.
The next two years, she was back and forth between New York and New Orleans. They married in 1996, and Heidi moved to New Orleans in 1997 after she finished her fellowship in psychiatric research. She now works as a psychiatrist for the state.
“I work in an area that is probably under water,” she said. “Many of my clients were probably in the Superdome.”
In fact, Calvin Rice said, his wife recognized people, indigents who did not have the means to get out, who were at the Superdome on TV.
Louisiana is one of the poorest states in the country, and a devastating hurricane has been one of the top anticipated disasters in the country, the Rices said. It should not have taken five days for the National Guard to get in.
The storm came on quickly, but the Federal Emergency Management Agency knew about it, Heidi Rice said. As part of Homeland Security, it was supposed to have planned for one of the most-likely disasters, but funds were shifted away from the levee projects long before Katrina.
“They obviously were surprised, but why?” she asked.
“That’s my frustration,” Calvin Rice said. “It was just the wrong people down there to get the kind of serious relief effort (needed).”
Those who could afford to put gas into their cars were able to evacuate, the Rices said, and that evacuation went relatively smoothly for about 1 million residents. The ones left behind didn’t have the resources to escape.
Heidi Rice’s office is located relatively near the Superdome, and she expects that it was flooded.
Calvin Rice said his office probably was flooded at the ground level with some breakage on the second floor. They didn’t know whether the building had any damage from vandalism.
The Rices are happy to be in Sweet Home, although they had just visited in July. They are both impressed with Holley School, the administration, the classrooms and enthusiastic teachers.
When it looked like they would not return to New Orleans soon, they decided to enroll the children in school.
“I’m really impressed,” Calvin Rice said. “I’m so thankful little Holley School is chugging along.”
They do not know when they will be able to return to New Orleans.
“It’s day by day,” Rice said. “And the information is unreliable.”
They will wait for basic utilities to be restored and school to open before returning. Their daughters’ school, which was not flooded, is expected to open on Jan. 3.
“It is quite surreal to realize that we are among an entire population of a major metropolitan area plus 200 miles of coastal communities that has been uprooted and scattered across the country,” they said. “We do not yet know the whereabouts of many friends, and some we have contacted have made the decision not to return to New Orleans. Heidi and I are not in that camp. We are both anxious to return and help with the rebuilding or our city when the infrastructure will support habitation, our school is back in session and the chaos has been calmed.”
Rice is already thinking about his own work when he returns. He is working with colleagues in Portland to devise an economical way to elevate the floors above flood levels.
He also thinks a debate needs to take place about whether to rebuild New Orleans in areas below sea level or to move them upriver. If rebuilt where it sits now, the floors in the new buildings should be rebuilt above the flood level, he said.
Rice also is concerned about how the rebuilding effort gets done, he said. “We couldn’t get it all done before I left.”
He worries that contractors who knew how to build the way the French did were rare beforehand, and now large no-bid contracts will go to large corporations that do not know how to restore historic buildings properly.
Contractors working on historic buildings need to know how to deal with soft plasters and mortars, French timber framing, copper flashing and slate roofing,Rice said, although “there is something to be said for applying big Band-Aids to big gaping holes.”
The Rices said they are doing all right financially for now.
Heidi Rice is receiving an income so far. Being a business owner, Calvin Rice will need to return to work as soon as he can though.
“We feel so fortunate that the homestead is here, and we’ve accepted our displacement,” he said.
“We know our house has a pretty rotten fridge,” Heidi Rice said. “In the scheme of things, we’re very, very lucky.”
They try to visit for a month in the summer each year, “get out of the urban rat race” and “hook into the country pace,” Calvin Rice said. They’re loving the weather here. It has been in the 90s in New Orleans.
The girls are enjoying the extended vacation with their grandparents too. They have noticed differences in school though.
“In New Orleans, we go to all different things,” Lily said. “We go to a different classroom to learn music. We have different classes.”
Here, everything is done in the same classroom, Lily said. She also noted that recess is only 11 minutes here while she gets a half hour in her own school. She said she loves being with her grandma every day, and she especially enjoys feeding the cows.
“I miss my bed,” Raven said.
“I miss not sleeping with Raven,” Lily said. The two are sharing a bed right now. “She always kicks me.”
The Rices ask for no assistance while they are in Sweet Home. They ask that people interested in helping donate to the Mercy Corps, http://www.mercycorps.org.